Moana and the Long Shadow of the Lion King

The Lion King is the best Disney film ever made. I’ve held that position for twenty years and nothing has come close to moving it—not Pocahontas, not The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not even Lilo & Stitch, which I’ll defend in a separate argument on a better day. The hand-drawn feature was Disney’s native language, and when the studio started phasing it out for CGI somewhere in the early 2000s, something specific went with it: a particular texture, a warmth in the way movement worked on screen. The films got technically more impressive. They also got less alive.

So the announcement of Moana—a new traditionally animated Disney feature set across the ancient islands of the South Pacific—felt like more than a slot on a release calendar. The story follows Moana Waialiki, daughter of a great seafarer, sent across the ocean to help her family, with demigods both benevolent and monstrous somewhere along the route. The world it’s set in, two thousand years in the past across Polynesian archipelagos, sounds like exactly the kind of thing that justifies animation—the colour, scale, and movement that works better when it doesn’t have to pretend to be real.

John Musker and Ron Clements are directing, which is a genuine reason for optimism. These are the people behind Aladdin and The Princess and the Frog, filmmakers who understand spectacle without losing the human stuff underneath. Mark Mancina—who scored Tarzan and Brother Bear—is handling the music, and he has a feel for the epic that doesn’t go hollow.

Whether any of this can land in the same atmosphere as The Lion King is a different question. Probably not. Nothing does. But the possibility that it might get close—that it might even try—is more than I’ve been able to say about a Disney announcement for a long time. The film is due in 2018. I’m already waiting.